The Historians' History of the World 01

One other monarch of the VIth Dynasty has gained traditional fame; this time through the pages of Herodotus. This is the Queen Nitocris. Herodotus, to be sure, gives us no clew as to the age when this female monarch ruled, but the name appears in the lists of Manetho. Herodotus was attracted by the picturesque story told him in reference to Nitocris by the Egyptian priests. He asserts that of the names of three hundred and thirty sovereigns, successors of Menes, recited to him from a book by the Egyptian priests, only one was a female native of the country. He continues: “The female was called Nitocris, which was also the name of the Babylonian princess. They affirm that the Egyptians having slain her brother, who was their sovereign, she was appointed his successor; and that afterwards, to avenge his death, she destroyed by artifice a great number of Egyptians. By her orders a large subterraneous apartment was constructed professedly for festivals, but in reality for a different purpose. She invited to this place a great number of those Egyptians whom she knew to be the principal instruments of her brother’s death, and then by a private canal introduced the river amongst them. They added, that to avoid the indignation of the people, she suffocated herself in an apartment filled with ashes.” (Herodotus, II, 99.)

The Turin papyrus gives the name of Nit-aqert as one of the Pharaohs of the VIth Dynasty, so it would appear that Herodotus was writing of an actual personage, whether or not the story that he tells was well founded. Manetho says of Nitocris that she governed twelve years, “the noblest and most beautiful woman of that period, fair, and at the same time the builder of the Third Pyramid.” Brugsch, commenting upon this, says: “It is difficult to discover the historical foundation for the tale of Herodotus, and we would only say that it must indicate that about the time of Queen Nitocris, internecine murders and dissensions began in the kingdom, awakened by the poisonous envy of the pretenders to the throne.” As to Manetho’s assertion that Nitocris built the Third Pyramid, it has been explained by Perring that the Third Pyramid was transformed and enlarged at a later date. It is suggested that “Queen Nitocris took possession of Men-kau-Ra’s tomb, left the king’s sarcophagus in a lower vault, and placed her own in the chamber in front. If we are to be guided by the ruined fragments of bluish basalt which lie on the spot, she had the surface of the monument faced with that costly decoration of highly polished granite, which afterward served inventive Greek story-tellers with a foundation for the tale of Rhodopis, the hetaira, who reduced her friends to beggary that she might obtain vast sums of money for the building of the pyramid.”

THE BEAUTIFUL NITOCRIS

Various romances have become associated with traditions in reference to Nitocris. She was credited with supernatural witchery, and it was said that after her death her naked spirit haunted the pyramid she was alleged to have built, and that by the magic of her mere smile she drove her lovers mad. The story of her revenge upon the men who, in a riot, had killed her brother the king, is given by Herodotus as above. The brother she avenged was Menthesouphis, whom Meyer places at some distance from her in the line. Round this same Nitocris gathered other legends, among them the original of our Cinderella story. According to this version, Nitocris was originally a courtesan named Rhodopis (“Rosy-cheeked”—a translation into Greek of the name Nitocris). Once when she was bathing in the river, an eagle stole one of her little gilded sandals, and flying away let it fall into the lap of the king, who was holding a court of justice in the open air. He was so taken with the beauty of the tiny shoe that he had a search made for the woman whom it fitted, and made her his queen.

Beyond the historical narratives of Una, and the traditions about Nitocris, only shreds of knowledge are forthcoming regarding the monarchs of the long epoch with which we are dealing. The epoch as a whole is well characterised in the words of Brugsch:a

A profound darkness falls over Egyptian history after the time of Ne-fer-ka-Ra, shrouding even the faintest traces of the existence of kings whose empty names the tablets of Abydos and Saqqarah have preserved to us, names without deeds, sounds without meaning, like the inscriptions on the tombs of unknown, obscure men. Unless we are deceived, we may here picture a state split up into petty kingdoms and scourged by civil war and regicide, from whose haq or princes no saviour arose to strike down the refractory with the strong arm, grasp with a firm hand the loosened rein, and once more establish a central government.h

In a few words may be added certain more or less inchoate details as to the few monarchs of the VIth to Xth Dynasties upon whose history the most recent research has thrown some rays of light.